Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

All too often, budding filmmakers who undertake this particular kind of film end up making themselves look bad- as filmmakers. (Even seasoned professionals are fully capable of biting off more than they can chew, sometimes.) Rarely do beginners risk adding insult to injury by putting themselves at risk in front of- as well as behind- the camera. It's been done, of course (and will no doubt be done again... and again and again...), but it's seldom been done as well as it has here. CAVITE, while technically not a one-man show, is just about as close as one can get these days- and it's an impressive piece of work. Minimalist movie-making at its best. Even seasoned professionals could learn something from this one.

The DVD box made it look like a watchable flick, but it was terribly misleading. It was a piece of crap. We get to watch some dope get led around by the nose for an hour or so by some terrorist wannabe on a cellphone. They want his money, they want him to blow up a building, and they will cut off pieces of his mother and sister to make it happen. The guy is told to close his bank account and give the bad guys the money. They couldn't get into the bank to film, so we get to watch a little kid eating a happy meal. How creative. The explosion at the church/mosque/whatever was equally impressive. Fast forward though a few phone calls and long walks and we get to the end. Same kid, same happy meal, sharing with grandma. How sweet. They couldn't bother to have an explosion sound effect and shake the camera a little? Then he goes home, talks to his cheating girlfriend, and curls up in bed crying....the end. What a waste of time. I got it as a freebie from Blockbuster, and I still feel cheated.

The concept for "Cavite" is not exactly new, as the storyline has been worked up before in at least one recent mainstream Hollywood movie.The concept is simple and exciting: an adult man who is from the Philippines has been living and working in the U.S. He gets a call to inform him that he's needed, urgently, at home. On the way out of town he's beset by an emotional crisis with his Stateside girlfriend, which he tries to resolve from a telephone in the airport.Right there I knew I was in trouble. The audio recording in this movie, at least as presented on DVD, is spotted with incomprehensible moments. The "trouble with his girl" sub-text is an important one, or it would not have been included in this briskly paced, and well-photographed story. It reoccurs at the end of the movie but only as an afterthought. There's a scene with the girlfriend talking, being very cold and cruel, and the main character is a wearing a mask of disgust because he is so emotionally spent. He cannot tell her what has happened to him, and she's an airhead, practically speaking.The main character is Adam, and a stranger on a cell phone is his Nemesis, his constant antagonist.Adam is a Muslim man in his mid-30s. The Philippines are overwhelmingly Christian and mostly Roman Catholic, but the substantial Muslim minority there has been raising hell on Mindanao ( and on other islands ), for a century or more. Recently, post-9/11, both domestic anti-terrorist units and U.S. forces have been employed against these Muslim guerrillas and many of them were killed.So, after flying across the Pacific, stopping over in Taipei and then landing in the Philippines, Adam is perplexed when his mother does not meet him at the airport. He soon learns that she cannot because she has been kidnapped by Muslim fanatics. They are threatening to kill her and Adam's sister if he does not cooperate fully.At first he thinks that all they really want is money, because they use him to loot a savings account left behind by his father -- one that holds $ 75,000, a most princely sum -- but eventually he figures out that they want him to be a mule for a terrorist bomb attack.More than half of the film is presented in moving sequences: he's riding in a Jeepney, on a bus, walking, running, taking a tricycle cab and walking some more. The nasty, bitchy fellow on the other end of the cell phone ( that was cleverly inserted into his luggage just before he left the airport on arrival ), alternately harangues him about being a good Muslim and then threatens to murder his mother.The good Muslim is extorting the slacker Muslim into delivering a bomb ... into a Christian church ... by threatening his family. The poor sap has no choice but to comply.The film's author and leading man showed great courage in even wanting to tackle this thorny subject. There are some clever moments in "Cavite". It could have been one of the truly great low-budget independents -- think "Mariachi," here -- if the hectic pace of the film had been reduced at certain points, to allow the viewer to see the size of the dilemma and the pain it causes Adam, and to see him feeling strange in the poverty-stricken neighborhoods of Cavite.Most of the time the cell phone tormentor is speaking Tagalog, or a mixture of Tagalog and English, and the subtitles for that seem to fly by ... meaning, once again, that it is impossible to grasp the size of the problem facing Adam ... because we know after the first four times that the caller says he is going to kill the mother and the sister that this is a bad hombre.Truly, I hate to discourage a young independent from using his many talents and gifts, and there is evidence of them in "Cavite." But then again, I took the time to screen this film on DVD twice, because I wanted to be sure that it wasn't just the herky-jerky camera work which was upsetting me. "Cavite" invites and involves, but it doesn't deliver 'the goods,' at the end, which is really a false ending and then the viewer is forced to endure a flat-out dead end.I think it was Chekov who once wrote, "a gun hung on the wall in Act One must be fired by Act Three". This is the advice the makers of "Cavite" should have heard before they labored so lovingly on it.Great effort and great ideas cannot succeed unless the film has a plot which illustrates the conflict, gives it context, and a resolution. It's only human nature to want an interesting story to have an interesting and meaningful ending. "Cavite" fails in that regard and so all the double-quick camera work and the hectic, panicky pace, goes for naught. One can only hope the principals of this picture will learn something from this, and do two things with their next film -- slow it down to a brisk walk, so that the plot can develop, and hire an actor who can express nuances, and something emotional, besides disgust.

Adam, a 32-year-old Filipino security guard from San Diego, must fly home to the Philippines after learning that his father is died. He lands at the Manila airport and waits for his mother to pick him up. She never does. He hears a ringing in his bag. It's a mysterious package with a ringing cell phone (think of The Matrix when Morpheus contacts Neo for the first time). Adam picks it up, and for the next hour, an Islamic extremist (who has kidnapped his mother and sister) threatens to kill Adam's family if he doesn't follow every single order he's given. Now that's suspense.I love that Cavite truly takes you down the streets of the Philippines, where people drink soda from a plastic bag and bet on cockfights (reminds me a lot of Mexico). Everything about this film is original and surprising. The only problems were technical (and hardly worth mentioning). One problem was the discontinuity of the sweaty shirt. Adam wears the same shirt throughout the film, and the shirt is sweatier at some points than at others. The other problem was believing that two cell phones batteries could last an entire day. Adam is constantly on the phone with his family's kidnapper, and he only runs out of battery once? I don't buy it. But I bought everything else.Equally as original as the plot of Cavite is the story about how this indie film found it's distribution. A U.T. class on advanced film producing promoted Cavite through the 2005 SXSW Film Festival and the 2005 Los Angeles Film Festival, and thanks to a deal with Mark Cuban's "Truly Indie" distribution initiative, Cavite is now showing at a theater near you, so check it out.